Everything about erosion, a full guide
All on erosion, a full guide? The most effective way of minimizing erosion is to guarantee a permanent surface cover on the soil surface, such as trees, pasture, or meadow. However, compared to original forest soils, soils in pasture fields and croplands have less capacity to hold up and are more susceptible to erosion. These soils also have less capacity to absorb water, which makes flooding (and its economic, social, and environmental impacts) more common. The increasingly high demand of a growing population for commodities such as coffee, soybean, palm oil or wheat is clearing land for agriculture. Unfortunately, clearing autochthonous trees and replacing them with new tree crops that don’t necessarily hold onto the soil increases the risks of soil erosion. With time, as topsoil (the most nutrient-rich part of the soil) is lost, putting agriculture under threat.
Water is nature’s most versatile tool. For example, take rain on a frigid day. The water pools in cracks and crevices. Then, at night, the temperature drops and the water expands as it turns to ice, splitting the rock like a sledgehammer to a wedge. The next day, under the beating sun, the ice melts and trickles the cracked fragments away. Repeated swings in temperature can also weaken and eventually fragment rock, which expands when hot and shrinks when cold. Such pulsing slowly turns stones in the arid desert to sand. Likewise, constant cycles from wet to dry will crumble clay.
Continued deflation of loose particles from landforms leaves behind larger particles that are more resistant to deflation. Wind action transports eroded material above or along the surface of Earth either by turbulent flow (in which particles move in all directions) or by laminar flow (in which adjacent sheets of air slip past one another). The transportation of wind-eroded material continues until the velocity of the wind can no longer sustain the size particle being transported or until the windblown particles collide with or cling to a surface feature. Discover extra details on erosion control website.
We aim at assessing the impacts of forest ecosystem management practices (e.g., selection of tree species, harvesting) on soil protection, as its planning schedule impacts soil erosion over the long-term (Lu et al. 2004; Panagos et al. 2014, 2015b). Our research examines how management practices contribute to change the vegetation cover over time. It further encapsulates these changes within the RUSLE, by determining the corresponding C-factor. Seven stand-level forest management models (sFMM), i.e., sequences of management practices, with species-specific rotations, over a 90-year time span, are used for testing purposes. Specifically, we assess and compare sFMM according to their potential for the provision of water-related ecosystem services under two climate scenarios.
Green manures are a few different crops that can be grown, not for produce or food usage, but grown in order to fertilize the farmland on which it grows. This method can improve the soil structure and suppresses the growth of weeds. When water evaporates from the soil, it leaves behind its salt. This can lead to damage to soil and nutrient loss. Using humic acids can prevent this or growing crops like saltbush can rejuvenate the soils and replace lost nutrients. High levels of salt in the soil can often be caused by changes made to the water table by damming and other causes.